GC 2006: Sony's Parcours Tour

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Company favors walking tour over press conference in Leipzig.

By Jeff Haynes

Of all the game companies that happened to attend the German Games Convention, the award for the most laidback presence would easily be taken by Sony. Instead of a press conference on Wednesday, SCEE chose to have a parcours mixer around their booth, with maps and tours of various titles being shown that attendees could visit at will. The first section that greeted visitors on this tour was the PSP lounge, which primarily focused upon titles like Ridge Racer, Formula One 06 and Tekken at its stations with soft bean bag chairs. The PSP area also featured items like the Location Free hardware for beaming television to the PSP, which has recently received a new price drop in Europe. Finally, the EyeToy and GPS attachments made an appearance, as well as the soon to be released Pink PSP in Europe.

The PSP area was bordered with a DJ station hyping the hip-hop influenced flavor of the PS2 section, which appeared to be made out of skate ramps and grafitti covered walls and pipes. There were video montages as well as playable versions of the E3 build of God of War 2, Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, as well as B-Boy and SOCOM 3 playable there. This was bordered by a couple of stations featuring a German game show and the appearance of Singstar Deutsch. The final area was another lounge that had a case of the PS3 under glass (just like E3) as well as the same video montawavesge shown during the E3 press conference.

So what's the deal? The lack of a press conference at the very least doesn't seem like the kind of move that a company with a console launch in three months would do. Well, it appears that the amount of attention focused upon TGS seems to be increasing almost daily, and even the Games Convention wasn't immune to this situation. There also appeared to be much more of a focus upon European (and particularly localized German titles), which reduced the number or kind of announcements that SCEE was going to make at the show, preparing to let later press releases speak for themselves. We'll see what kind of waves Sony makes at TGS in less than a month.